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British Library to Archive Electronic Resources
An anonymous reader writes "The British Library is a government-owned library that legally has to hold a copy of every book, pamphlet, map, journal, newspaper and piece of sheet music published in the UK. Today, that law changed and now the Library will be able to collect non-paper resources, such as websites, electronic journals, CD-ROMs and microfilms. Obviously, the library won't be archiving everything in these categories (for a start, the Wayback Machine already does a pretty good job of the websites), but will be keeping resources of national, historical or academic interest. There's more specific information in The British Library's press release. BBC News (which will now be archived by the Library) has an article on the changes."
Yeah it'll be interesting to see how the info will be stored. Looks like they're also collecting CD-ROMs and other "non-print publications." I don't think they absolutely need to store it somewhere that'll last for 100 years. They could store it in redundant media and just replicate them over time as the media's lifespans expire.
As far as fast recall, the articles don't say if the info will be available on the net. If it's just for archival purposes, they don't need to put it anywhere that's quickly accessible. After all it's a government-run library, so nobody will expect to take less than a day or two to retrieve anything.